Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Algebra 1 - Linear Graphs and Inequalities Interactive Notebook Pages

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you accept this blog post with photos of notebook pages from our latest unit in Algebra 1 about linear graphs and inequalities as a gift today. I know it's not balloons or chocolate, but I promise that this is from the heart.

It took an entire month, but we finally made it through our unit in Algebra 1 on Linear Graphs and Inequalities. This is a relief because I am incredibly behind where I should be based on last year's pacing. Luckily, the next few units are short and sweet!

Each unit begins with a divider. You can read more about these dividers here.

Every unit divider contains the list of all of our SBG skills. This unit was a looooonnnngggg one with eight separate skills.

Though the idea of slope is a middle school standard in Oklahoma, I find that I have to go ALL the way back to the basics with my Algebra 1 students.

We began by refreshing our memories of the four types of slope. For practice, we wrote our name using only straight line segments. Then, we color-coded each line segment in our name according to its type of slope.

I created two new foldables for this unit: finding slope and finding intercepts.

First up: Finding Slope!

On the inside of each flap, we practiced finding slope given two examples of that type (graph, equation, table).

Then, we did the same thing for intercepts.

I used some of the same examples as for finding slope, but I had to change a few to make them work out. In the future, I'd like to re-engineer these foldables to use the exact same examples in both.

Now, it's time to practicing finding slope and intercepts.

At this point, students can do the following
* Find Slope (From Graphs, Tables, Equations)
* Find Intercepts (From Graphs, Tables, Equations)
* Write the Equation of a Line in Slope-Intercept Form
* Rearrange an Equation from Point-Slope Form or Standard Form to Slope-Intercept Form
* Graph a Line in Slope-Intercept Form

This is enough to begin discussing parallel and perpendicular lines.

I used this same foldable last year. We discovered all of this information by doing some discovery-type activities that I will have to blog about soon!

It's time to practice graphing a pair of equations and classifying the graph as parallel, perpendicular, or neither.

Up to this point, students only know about slope-intercept form. They've dealt with equations in other forms, but our approach was always to rearrange the equation to slope-intercept form FIRST. It's time we learn the name and characteristics of each of the three forms of linear equations.

This foldable is also from last year.

Like usual, our foldable is followed by a zillion practice problems. Students are given several pieces of information (such as a graph or a slope and a point or a slope and an intercept or a table of points), and they have to figure out every single other piece of information.

Finding some of the information (usually standard form and sometimes x-intercepts) requires writing out work. As you can see in the photo above, we wrote the work on the back of the half-sheet.

We stapled all of our practice sheets together at the top. We only glued in the back page to save paper.

Next, we looked at writing functions and creating graphs for real-world situations. I found these problems online here.

It's time to discuss transformations of linear functions, now!

My husband made this transformations foldable for me last year when I was sick.

I introduced my students to the following vocabulary words: reflected, dilated, and translated.

For practice, we just wrote some problems on the next blank page in our notebooks.

Up next: scatter plots

This was a shift from my approach to Algebra 1 standard ordering last year. I decided to move scatter plots and lines of best fit from the data analysis unit to the linear graphs and inequalities unit.

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